The "Rognosa" tower in San Gimignano: digital acquisition and structural analysis

The paper describes the research activities conducted on the 13th century Rognosa tower in San Gimignano (Siena, Italy), the historic town inscribed on the Unesco World Heritage List in 1990. A structural nonlinear analysis of the tower has been performed via the freeware finite element code NOSA. The finite element mesh of the tower has been generated using a three-dimensional digital model of the tower and the surrounding buildings. The geometry data has been acquired by means of a time-of-flight laser scanner and then processed into the open source software MeshLab and other geometry processing tools. The behaviour of the tower, subjected to its own weight and time-dependent loads modelling the seismic excitations, has been investigated.